Etel Adnan: On Paper, 1960–2021

  • Opening Thursday, February 13, 2025, 5:00pm – 7:00pm Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present Etel Adnan:...
    O Moon, c. 1960s
    Ink on paper
    Suite of six, each: 10 ⅝ x 13 ¾ in (27 x 35 cm)
    (GL16579)
     

    Opening Thursday, February 13, 2025, 5:00pm – 7:00pm

    Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present Etel Adnan: On Paper, 1960-2021, a survey of works on paper by the late artist and writer, opening on Thursday, February 13, 2025. This is the fourth solo exhibition at the gallery by Adnan, who had her first solo exhibitions at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York and Paris in 2015. This exhibition is the first in the United States to show Adnan's works on paper in depth, including compositions in ink, pencil, pastel, and watercolor, and a selection of leporello artist books. These represent nearly six-decades of Adnan's creative output until her death in 2021. The works on view showcase her distinctive use of gesture and perception across mediums, drawing inspiration from a range of artistic genres such as landscape, still life, and abstraction. This exhibition is held in commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the artist's birth, and in conjunction with Etel Adnan: In the Rhythms of the World, a seminar celebrating Adnan's writing organized by Omar Berrada and Simone Fattal and jointly hosted by the Poetry Project and Giorno Poetry Systems, New York.

    The presentation begins in the 1960s, when Adnan worked primarily in an abstract, almost Symbolist manner. Several drawings depicting meetings of celestial bodies are made only with black ink on paper, as though while writing she felt a compulsion to make a drawing with her fountain pen. In a suite of drawings entitled O Moon (c. 1960s), she presents a poem on six sheets of paper, the lines of verse illustrated with ink sketches in the shapes of moons and boats. In select contemporaneous works, ink lines that evoke static shapes and figures are interspersed in fields of soft watercolor, gouache, and pastel, while in others the feeling is decidedly expressive, with the drawings acquiring a more frenetic, joyful energy. Across these early works, Adnan's burgeoning interest in both color and the natural world takes hold.

  • Many of the drawings on view are informed by Adnan's experience of displacement and invoke the nostalgia of memory, echoing...
    Tamalpaïs, Sausalito, 1988
    Watercolor and ink on paper
    13 x 15 ¾ in (33 x 40 cm)
    Framed: 22 x 24 ¾ x 1 ¼ in (55.9 x 62.9 x 3.2 cm)
    (GL15137)

    Many of the drawings on view are informed by Adnan's experience of displacement and invoke the nostalgia of memory, echoing the vibrant painted landscapes for which Adnan is best known.  A selection of works depicts landscapes that would have been familiar to the artist throughout her life in California and France, between which she lived and worked after leaving her native Lebanon. Often, Adnan returns to the same scene, altering its presentation through subtle changes in material and tone. Among the locales that recur in the works on view are Mount Tamalpais, the northern California mountain that served as a well of inspiration for Adnan, both in paintings and drawings throughout her oeuvre and as the subject of one of her best-known prose essays, Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986). In Tamalpaïs (1986), Adnan depicts the subject entirely in watercolor, using differing shades to denote the qualities of the landscape. Two years later, Adnan depicts the same scene in Tamalpaïs, Sausalito (1988), now combining watercolor with bold strokes of ink. These two compositions, juxtaposed, highlight how Adnan's personal observation and recollection of the landscape is rendered through light and color.

    Parallel to these images of the mountain is a series of seascapes depicting Erquy, a coastal town in Brittany where Adnan spent summers in the later years of her life. The two landscapes—scenes that held comforting familiarity for Adnan—create a dichotomy of peaks and basins, of earth and water. The works depicting Erquy are among the most recent in the show, including leporellos created in the final year of the artist's life.

  • A series of drawings created in 1991 imagine a traditional still life subject, a bowl of fruit, in various forms....
    Erquy The Edge, 2021
    India ink on booklet
    7 ⅞ x 5 ½ x 133 ⅞ in (20 x 14 x 340 cm)
    (GL15194)

    A series of drawings created in 1991 imagine a traditional still life subject, a bowl of fruit, in various forms. In one ink drawing, Adnan relies only on outlines to create her forms, using thicker strokes to shade the fruit and add detail to the container holding it. In others, Adnan returns to a lighter ink line and employs watercolors to add subtle color to the fruit, reflecting the masterful handling of color for which Adnan is known.

    The artist's leporellos—accordion-folded books that measure several feet long when stretched—will also be on view. This format bridges the two branches of Adnan's work: the visual arts and writing. While Adnan, who was known first as an author of poetry and prose, viewed her written and artistic practices as distinct entities, these artist books see her meld the two. Borrowing the formal qualities of books, Adnan at times incorporates repeated symbols and strokes reminiscent of written language, hinting at this other core aspect of her multi-faceted, decades-long career. As the artist once said, "my writing is involved with history as it is made (but not only) and my painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape."

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